String instruments used by
John McFee making Homestead Redemption

My Collings here is what I used for the majority of the 6 string acoustic guitar parts on the project - a great instrument. Collings guitars, made in Austin, Texas, make steel string acoustic guitars that are as fine as any you will see.

This is an instrument I jammed with at Dean Markley’s house one night, and I liked it so much I talked him into selling it to me. I remember in particular using this for the 6 string acoustic part on Stealin’.

I have a number of Dobros - this one is a Phil Leadbetter model Dobro, very nice, and I used this for the Dobro parts on Chicken Butt. Phil has won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s “Dobro Player Of The Year” award twice, and his work has also been Grammy nominated. An interesting side note - it is the only guitar being made as of 2017 which bears the name "Dobro".

A really great 12 string - wonderful sound, easy on the fingers. I used this on the walk-down descending lines in Harvest.

Gotta love the sound of the metal body resonator instruments. The slide guitar work on Goin’ To The Country was played on this beautiful instrument.

Used on the intro melodic guitar work on the Alex version of Mr. Moon. This is a really fine instrument, made in Alicante, Spain.

My good friend Hank Linderman, whom I met as Timothy B. Schmit’s musical director when I was part of a band backing Timothy up for a benefit concert, called me one day and told me about a special sale of these Wechter high string guitars going on at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. It’s the only guitar I know of specifically manufactured to be a “high string” or Nashville tuned guitar - usually you have to modify a regular 6 string acoustic guitar to make it a proper “high string” guitar. High string guitars are essentially strung to be tuned like the high strings only of a 12 string guitar, with the lower four strings an octave higher than a normal 6 string guitar - this is what gives them their unique sound. After meeting up with Hank and going to McCabe’s to check it out, I bought this guitar and used this for the chimey sounding chordal parts on Stealin’ - very happy with how it worked on this song.

Somewhat newer instrument, used for the banjo work on Chicken Butt

A rather unusual instrument that I’ve owned for a very long time - the only Sho-Bud banjo I’ve ever seen, as a matter of fact. Sho-Bud is really known pretty much exclusively as a pedal steel brand - I played a double neck Sho-Bud pedal steel for years. Sho-Bud was founded by Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons. I used this banjo on Fourty Niner, the main body of the song, and on Goin’ To The Country.

I call this the “Walecki Banjo” because it was given to me by one of my favorite people in the whole world, the amazing Fred Walecki. Fred was the proprietor of Westwood Music, or Westwood Musical Instruments, which was founded by his father, and Fred knows more about musical instruments in general than anybody alive - just ask Chris Martin, the head of Martin Guitars, who said in an interview once that really the interviewer should ask Fred Walecki the more in depth questions about Martin Guitars, as Fred knows more than anybody about the history and details. Anyway, Fred gave me this banjo, which has no name or logo of any kind. It was definitely made in the 1800s, at a time before “branding” was particularly prevalent on “folk” instruments of this type. I used this on the old time frailing banjo part at the end of Fourty Niner.

This is the bass I used on Go Raise Hell Up In Heaven - Johnny Ciambotti always played a Precision bass and it just felt right to use this for the song that was a tribute to Johnny. Also used on Mitch’s Tune, for the lower range it allows.

Although nominally a bass, this type of instrument (the VI designation) was mostly used (back in the day) for “tick tack” bass - usually doubling bass lines with a very trebly sound with a lot of pick attack. It’s range is exactly an octave below a normal guitar. Also used for playing “baritone guitar” type lines. I employed it for some light low end line reinforcement in the yodeling section of Chicken Butt. Note that it even has a whammy or tremolo bar, something not normally seen on a bass.

Used on Lizard Rock ’n’ Roll Band, Love Is Gone, Could You Call It Love. Good all around bass guitar - thanks again, Leo Fender.

One of the big advantages of the Variax instruments is that they convincingly emulate a wide variety of real world instrument types and models. I used this instrument to get an acoustic upright bass sound on Monopoly.

Classic Telecaster look, feel, and sound - this is the guitar I used on Lizard Rock ’n’ Roll Band. It’s a relatively new instrument, manufactured in Mexico, but it is like playing a really good old Telecaster.

The Jaguar was, in its day, the top of the line Fender guitar. I always wanted one, and after I had gotten my Squier JazzCaster or TeleMaster (Jazzmaster neck and neck pickup, Telecaster body and bridge pickup) I was so impressed by the quality - even though the Squier line is a lower cost series by Fender - that I thought I’d try out their Jaguar. I was very happy with it - I played this on the eight measures of soloing beginning at 4 minutes into Chicken Butt…

I reference this instrument as listed here because it features a Jazzmaster neck and neck pickup, and a Telecaster body and bridge pickup - a combination that I always thought would be a good one, so when I saw that for a limited time it was being made as part of the Squier line, I bought it immediately. It was so inexpensive that I wasn’t sure how good it might be, but the concept was so attractive that I felt it was worth the gamble, Well, this guitar gave me one of my favorite sounds on this whole project - I used it for the lead guitar work on Monopoly. Really great sound, and from the cheapest instrument I used on Homestead Redemption.

This Telecaster style guitar was made by Joe Vallee, who has been Pat Simmons’ guitar tech for years with the Doobie Brothers. He had it backstage at one of our shows, and I liked it so much when I tried it out that I ended up buying it from Joe. I used this on a lot of Chicken Butt and for the lead work on Goin’ To The Country.

I used this mandolin for all the mandolin parts - Fourty Niner, Love Is Gone, Harvest, etc., and this is my go-to mandolin.

I used this for the Merle Travis style picking in the yodeling section of Chicken Butt… thanks go to Ron “Bear” Jones and Epiphone for gifting me this very cool guitar.

There’s a reason why I never sell or get rid of any instruments - it’s because I had a Gretsch Jet when I was very young and regretted having let it go. I acquired this one a while back because I missed that sound. I used this for the lead guitar on the Alex version of Mr. Moon… it has a very unique sound. George Harrison used to play one of these.

This is the best baritone guitar I’ve ever had. I used it to reinforce the bass lines on Mitch’s Tune - thanks to Charles Lindert…

Larry Porgreba, an artist and rather eclectic guitar maker from Montana, made this one-of-a-kind guitar. This is another instrument that Fred Walecki turned me on to - its hollow body and oddball pickups give this one-of-a-kind instrument a one-of-a-kind sound. It’s tuned three half steps below standard guitar tuning - I used this for the main guitar part on Go Raise Hell Up In Heaven. It inspired me to play a non-repetitive stream of conciousness style - kind of like what I used to do as a youth in Clover…

My Emmons here was my main pedal steel through my Southern Pacific years (note the Southern Pacific railroad logo) and I used it on this project for the song Stealin’.

Very special, the Fender 400. This is the ultimate “Bakersfield Sound” steel guitar - the Fenders were favored by Ralph Mooney and Tom Brumley on so many classic recordings by Buck Owens in particular, I used this instrument, manufactured before 1959 (hard to pinpoint exactly as the serial numbers were inconsistent to begin with and records were lost as well) on Monopoly, and the sound on the recording was taken direct out of the instrument, no EQ, no amplifier, just a little bit of delay added post recording. The pickups were basically Jazzmaster pickups made for more strings to accommodate the configuration of the pedal steel.

This has become my main recording pedal steel. I bought this after Paul Franklin Jr. let me use his pedal steel on a session we were working on together in Nashville. I had been hired to play guitar, and we got to a song where the producer wanted Paul to play Dobro and then he asked me to play steel on the same song - I didn’t have a pedal steel there, so Paul told me to just use his. I liked it so much that Paul hooked me up with his dad, who was the maker of the instruments, and that’s how I ended up with this pedal steel. Wonderful steel… I used this on a number of songs on this project - Fourty Niner, Mitch’s Tune, etc.

This is the pedal steel I used on the first Clover recordings, and which you can see me using as a teenager in the old photo of me playing pedal steel in the Homestead Redemption packaging. I had gifted this instrument to Mitch’s brother, Chris Howie, almost fifty years ago, and the process of making this project prompted Chris to very generously offer to return it to me - I am now reunited with my first pedal steel. The Gibsons were manufactured in the 1950s and were the first mass produced pedal steel guitars - this one features the much sought after and valuable PAF (patent applied for) Gibson pickup, one of the best sounding pickups ever made.

The Line 6 Variax guitars have become my main instruments for live performance, and their incredible versatility makes them great for studio work as well. I would have used them even more normally, but this project had a special connection to my past, and I grew up playing nothing but the Telecaster for many, many years - hence all the Telecaster and Fender instruments in general used on this recording project. Nevertheless, I used this Variax for the electric guitar work on Fourty Niner, as it allowed me to get a Telecaster type sound with a custom tuning (although the instrument itself was still in standard tuning) to get the voicings I wanted.

I’ve had this Variax for a very long time now - it’s one of their original model versions of the Variax. I used this for the “Alison” style guitar work on the Elvis Costello version of Mr. Moon, mainly because I have used it quite a number of times when performing his song Alison in live concert situations and that was the sound and style I wanted for this song. It perfectly captures the sound I got on my old Telecaster on the original recording for the My Aim Is True album.

This is the model of Variax that I’m currently using for my live performance work. Again, the versatility of the Variax instruments is fantastic. I used this to layer different sounds on Love Is Gone.

This is the instrument I used for all the violin parts on the project. It is a 5 string violin, as opposed to the “normal” 4 string configuration. The extra string extends the range of the instrument down a fifth, giving it the exact range of a violin and viola combined. I bought this violin from David Bromberg, a very cool musician with a great history of his own, through his shop in Wilmington, Delaware - David Bromberg Fine Violins.

This is a standard 4 string viola, and I used it for the viola parts of the string quartet arrangement for the Elvis Costello version of Mr. Moon. I could have used my five string violin, as it has the range of the viola, but the true viola body has a sound of its own.

This is the instrument I used for the cello part on the string quartet arrangement for Elvis Costello’s version of Mr Moon, fulfilling a long held ambition to play all the parts - violin, viola, and cello - on a string quartet recording.

A very cool instrument, designed by Ned Steinberger, I used this for the cello parts on Harvest.